Mindfulness

     Mindfulness training is based on Jon Kabat-Zinn’s well-established (since 1979) and thoroughly researched (over a thousand scientific papers & books) Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) program. Mindfulness training helps to broaden and deepen our perspective.

     Our education is dominated by the rational (calculation, explanation, logical analysis), and sensory (observation, measurement) - "the rational-empirical approach that has set the standard for knowing across most disciplines. However, contemplation adds a third way of knowing – a missing link – that both complements and enhances the rational and sensory. The contemplative mind is opened and activated through a wide range of approaches – from pondering to poetry to meditation – that are designed to shift states of mind in order to cultivate such capacities as deepened awareness, concentration and insight. Historically, the contemplative has been used throughout the wisdom traditions as fundamental for developing interiority and understanding the most essential knowledge, yet it is almost entirely absent from contemporary education.

     … opening the contemplative mind in schools is not a religious issue but a practical epistemic question. It is about how we know, not about what knowledge we are giving others. Inviting the contemplative simply includes the natural human capacity for knowing through silence, looking inward, pondering deeply, beholding, witnessing the contents of our consciousness and so forth. These approaches cultivate an inner technology of knowing and thereby a technology of learning and pedagogy without any imposition of religious doctrine whatsoever. If we knew that particular and readily available activities would increase concentration, learning, well-being, social and emotional growth, and catalyze transformative learning, we would be cheating our students to exclude it. Contemplative knowing may provide just those offerings.”
     Hart T. From information to transformation. Education for the evolution of consciousness. Peter Lang Publishing, NY, 2009.

Interview with Andries J. Kroese, retired vascular surgeon & Mindfulness teacher